Free Special Issue of ITID

A new, special issue of the journal Information Technologies and International Development (ITID), co-edited by IMTFI external advisory board's Jonathan Donner, is now freely available at the ITID website.

ITID is an interdisciplinary open-access journal that focuses on the intersection of information and communication technologies (ICTs) with the "other four billion" – the share of the world population whose countries are not yet widely connected to the Internet nor widely considered in the design of new information technologies.

From Jonathan's blog and the introduction to the special issue:
"Taking these articles together, we gain a fuller picture of the roles and impacts of information access on ongoing development processes, including not only the design and use of specific technological solutions, but also their relationships to specific user, social, and policy contexts. As digital access grows in developing countries, we can imagine that these findings will be relevant to a broad range of both public and private actors seeking to better understand the design, uses, and impacts of ICTs in developing countries."

Interactive Voice Response a Tool in Citizenship Participation

http://cgnetswara.org/

Jonathan Donner, a member of IMTFI's external advisory board, has a new paper out in collaboration with Preeti Mudliar on Interactive Voice Response use in India. Details of the paper can be found on Donner's blog. The archival version is available here, behind the Sage paywall. A ‘pre-publication’ version is hosted right here.

In Donner's second study of CGNET's Swara platform (the first can be found here), a citizen journalism software, the team take a phenomenological approach to look at user-interaction in rural India. Results of the study suggest that the platform can provide an alternative media tool to mainstream channels, that users tend to be social activists, and that users have different interpretations of what they are dealing with: "Not only does the technology represented by the features of the IVR convince them that they are being heard, but their conviction also extends to who they think is listening to them."